Book Review Lunch and Learn: From principles to practice — Ideas to help implement best teaching practices
In Ken Bain’s book, titled “What the Best College Teachers Do,” he recounts success stories of innovative ideas implemented by instructors that yielded positive results. From these examples, he distills the underlying principles leading to student success and encourages others to emulate these principles in their course design. This led me to examine what I do in class and highlight the similarities between certain successful class activities and the underlying principles outlined in Bain’s book. To illustrate this, I will highlight the underlying principles in a few of the chapters and then provide examples of activities that involve me putting these principles into practice. [Follow this link to read our synopsis of the book.]
Chapter Two: What Do They Know about How We Learn?
The second chapter of the book asks us as instructors to think about how students learn as well as students’ expectations. This sentiment can be captured in the following two excerpts from the book:
1. People learn best when they are asked an important question that they care about answering. (p. 31)
2. …characteristics of highly respected courses included “high demands” but “with plentiful opportunities to revise and improve their work before it receives a grade… (p. 36)
With respect to the first excerpt above, I do what I can to create interesting scenarios upon which assignments are based, to get the students to care about the questions they are answering. This could range from hypothetical scenarios where students take on actual roles they could one day occupy (like a consultant or an analyst in a local company) to scenarios where they help alien bounty hunters maximize profit in an increasingly open universe. The idea is that these memorable questions not only prove to be interesting and show a wide range of applicability but generate an intrinsic interest in finding the solutions, beyond just getting a good grade.
The second approach is to completely sidestep the guesswork in asking interesting questions and, instead, get students to come up with questions they find interesting based on the material. As a standard part of my group assignments, students are asked to come up with original multiple-choice questions that, if selected, will either be presented in class as part of in-class activities or included as part of the question set from which exam questions will be generated. I have gotten some really good exam questions from doing this and it has helped me better understand gaps in student understanding, which can then be addressed in class.
The third approach is to ask polarizing questions. This can be accomplished by asking either a purposefully ambiguous question to draw attention to a clarifying point, or a question whose answer is not directly addressed in class, but can be derived from what was covered, to provide examples of the best ways to apply class concepts to real-world scenarios.
In doing all of these, the key is to incentivize the students to actively take part, while creating an avenue where mistakes are not only allowed, but potentially encouraged. This is done to minimize the salience of extrinsic motivations. This requires some inventive grading rules and brings me to the second excerpt from the book listed above.
The points assigned to these activities I have mentioned above do not make up a significant portion of their total grade calculation (less than 5%). This creates a “low stakes” environment where students are encouraged to try and fail. Another example that highlights the idea of low stakes opportunities are the mini-projects I give my students. Students get the mini-project (a set of 10 multiple choice questions involving a scenario and questions based on economic models that we go through in the class) before and after the model is taught. The expectation is that students will know absolutely nothing and hence will score a zero before the model is discussed. I state my expectation that they will earn a zero, and this motivates them to prove me wrong — despite the fact that this first attempt does not count towards their grade. Students work on the project for as long as I give them. I had one student that earned a perfect score come up to me at the end of class to introduce himself (bragging rights if you will, costless but effective). This low stake assignment allows them to truly give it their all and examine how they would answer the questions without thinking about the impact on their grade. As a result, they come up with both successes and failures from which they can learn. This, coupled with the fact that the exact same quiz is given out again after the model has been discussed, increases attention, participation, and interest when we go through the model in class.
Chapter Five: How Do They Conduct Class?
In the fifth chapter, we are taken through some common themes in how these teachers conduct their class and the ones that stuck out for me, deals with the idea of getting student’s attention, keeping said attention, and creating a natural critical learning environment. This is best captured in the following excerpt:
The best teaching creates a sense that everyone is working together, whether that means working on a problem silently while listening to the professor or reasoning aloud with other students and the professor. Moreover, the questions, issues, and problems are authentic: they seem important to students and are similar to those that professionals in the field might undertake. (p. 100)
While this points back to some of the approaches I have discussed above, I wanted to focus on the idea of gaining and retaining students’ attention. I believe this starts from the very first class. As part of syllabus day, I ask students to tell me what they hope to gain from the class. As they tell me their expectations, I immediately discuss the parts of the class that address their specific desires. Should they mention things that are not covered, I will do my best to use the discussion platforms to address those concerns. This creates a degree of student buy-in, and they are more willing to go along on the journey.
Another approach is to use my course objectives listed on the syllabus to create this student buy-in. As opposed to writing the objectives as what they should know at the end of the class, I write the objectives as what they will be able to do at the end of the class. As an illustration, consider the difference in the mind of a student between these two objectives:
1. Students will be able to understand the importance of exchange rate fluctuations.
vs.
2. Students will be able to make basic predictions about the direction of investment in different countries, given the degree of exchange rate fluctuation.
The second statement provides a more direct link to real world applications and piques the students’ interest now that they have a potential application of the skill you are trying to teach them. I always make references to the objectives when I cover the module that addresses those skills.
Lastly, I make “weird statements” that are at first glance a head-scratcher, but after some exposition, comes to make sense to the students. For example, to illustrate the simple point that distance is a factor in trade flows and impacts the final price of goods, I provided the following weird statement: “US textile and clothing manufacturers should lobby the US government to rejoin and uphold the Paris environmental accords.”
The point of this statement was to show that due to the melting polar ice caps, ships are able to cut the distance traveled by 4000 miles, getting to their destinations faster and paying less for transportation, further increasing the competition being faced by US textile manufacturers. The only recourse, then, is to fight climate change and get those ice caps frozen again. I let the students know that this kind of analysis is what I expect them to be able to do at the end of the class, as well, which encourages them to start thinking outside the box. While I focus on the first day of class here, these are things that can be reintroduced before each new topic or at frequent intervals throughout the class to keep students continuously engaged.
Chapter Seven: How Do They Evaluate Their Students and Themselves?
In the last chapter I have chosen to discuss, the idea is for instructors to evaluate on two levels: first to evaluate student performance, and second to use student performance to carry out self-evaluation. This is summarized in the following excerpt:
When they assess their students, they do so in part to test their own efforts to facilitate learning. When they evaluate their teaching, they do so by looking at learning, both the objectives and the outcomes (p. 151)
It is not ideal to wait until the end-of-semester course evaluation to gather student feedback, because issues might exist throughout the class without ever being addressed. Frequent check-ins and actual follow-up shows a degree of interest in your students’ learning process and makes you a better teacher. I have always taken the pulse of the class in general after the first midterm to not only get feedback on both their and my performance but also to suggest potential solutions that can address any knowledge gaps. I have recently started using slido.com to conduct this poll. (The college also has a license for Poll Everywhere or some use Kahoot! or TopHat to do similar polling.) I ask a few students to post issues they had with the exam that they feel, if addressed, would have made them perform better. Next, I ask the rest of the class to up-vote points they agree with, and down-vote ones they disagree with. The issues with the highest up-votes rise to the top of the pool and I address the top 3 to 5 issues. The anonymity allows for more honest and useful feedback without fear of persecution. Warning: be prepared to take a hard look at your approach to teaching should you choose to do this!!! Following this exercise, I also poll students to find out what proportion use the resources provided (be it office hours, meeting with the TA or peer tutor) and students can start to see for themselves how much these resources are utilized, and can see this as a way to improve their scores. Putting plans in place to address these issues has led to better student performance and my improvement as an instructor.
These are just some of the ways that I have adapted these principles to my classes (I have more, so find me and let’s talk!). I should note that they were not all introduced at once, but was more of a gradual process that has evolved into what it is now. So I encourage you to start small, think about what you would like to accomplish, implement it and continue to build on it. I look forward to adapting the new and creative ideas you come up with to my class. Good luck!
